I'm a Skeptic, Dickhead

I've seen a lot, and to use the modern parlance, a lot a lot a lot, of dramatizations of backward time travel. You know, where someone goes back in time to meet their parents, or to discover the answer to some mystery, or just by accident. Whatever the reason, there are many complications. We've heard of the "butterfly effect" that can cause untold changes in future history from the smallest change in the past. The dramatizations often address certain aspects of this, but they can't possibly capture all the many changes and the drastic result of such interference. There's also the fact that, if backward time travel were possible, wouldn't we be all too aware of it by now? The people who come "back" usually end up going forward again to where they came from, like time travel is a round-trip ticket. Aside from the presumption that, for this type of time travel to be possible, many (if not all) points in time must exist simultaneously, there are so many complications to the logistics of it. Even if it becomes possible sometime in the distant future, wouldn't someone come back to our time, SOME time in our lives, to see how it really was here and now? I don't know, I just feel like time travelers would be like vegans, in that they wouldn't be able to shut up about it. In the stories they usually give some reason (or no reason, just the impression) that the time traveler cannot let anyone know that they have traveled through time. Something about affecting the future. But their being there would do that. Besides, if it were a real thing, you wouldn't have only the best and brightest scientific minds performing the research. You would have every dipshit who could afford it going back and making a spectacle of themselves. I just feel like somebody would blow it and give it away at some point. And if going back and fixing what future peoples perceive as "wrongs", then isn't it true that there would be no "bad" anymore? Wouldn't we have sent droves of prepared peoples back to make everything what the populace thinks it should have been? 

Personally, I don't think "time" is so eloquently structured so as to have these mechanisms in place to allow jumping around, and to prevent drastic changes, or keep Marty McFly from getting the pickup truck he wanted. I think that we see change, and we created the concept of "time" to explain it, and, as humans tend to do, we've assigned these properties and characteristics to it that it never had, and can't have. The past, by definition, is "that which is no more." That's my definition, but it's what I believe. I know that's not very romantic or dramatic or imaginative. Also, I would like to find out that I am wrong. Same with extraterrestrial visitors to our planet; do I believe in extraterrestrial intelligence? Absolutely! Do I believe they've visited our planet? It's quite possible, bordering on likely. Were we alive and aware and able to communicate with them at the time? I don't think so. But space travel is a real thing. Time travel, except in our perception, is not. As they say, the light we see from distant stars is as many years old as it is light-years distant. In that sense we are seeing back in time. But the difference is we can't interact with it, change it, alter the course of where it's already been. The only thing we can see or have an effect on is the reverberations through space that reach us. The star doesn't know we're here. It isn't changed in any way because of us. If we could fly toward it quickly enough, time would appear to speed up as we got closer to it and the changes it was undergoing became apparent to us sooner after their actual occurrence. That's only because we would be lessening the distance between the object and the observer, taking less time for the light to span the difference. At the same time, though, visual evidence of the world we were leaving would slow down, but time on Earth would march on just as before, and when the observers returned, they would not return to the "time" that they left, but after the amount of time that they were gone. Time may have slowed down for the perception of our sun as we moved away from it, but it would speed up again on our return, and we would come back to exactly the same time we left plus the time we were gone by Earth standards. The star we traveled to would be observed more responsively as we approached it, and then would slow down again as we left it, as the light waves chased us in our retreat. Therefore, time is all in perception, not something that can be manipulated and altered. It's fun to speculate and hypothesize about it, and if it wasn't an age-old concept immortalized many times over in fiction, I would come up with all kinds of great story lines and ideas and theories about it. But it's been done enough that we all know, if it were possible, we would know about it by now. How many people have suggested going back in time and stopping Hitler before WWII? Yet we still know who Hitler is. We still consider him to be one of the most evil of all world leaders. If he could be stopped, I think someone would have by now. Or by then. 

One of the more entertaining versions of the time-travel story that I have seen is the Australian short film "I'm You, Dickhead." It takes a different approach to the time-travel idea, including commercializing it, and some wild and unexpected consequences (plus the moustaches). I hate spoilers, and so will not be providing any, but I will say it's a brief look at the dangers possible. 

I love to sit around and talk about all the reasons why backward time travel is not possible. I started watching a television series that heavily features such time-twisting adventures with my daughter. We have a good time watching it, but I also enjoy pointing out all the ways that this or that wouldn't work. It's a fun bonding time for the two of us. I would be sad if stories like this didn't exist.

You may note that (or wonder why) I repeatedly specify "backward time travel." That's because, of course, I do believe in forward time travel. Not only are we doing it every moment, but if the prized perception of an observer were frozen in some way and then was able to be reinstated/reanimated, the observer (assuming his faculties and memory were in tact) would have traveled forward in time further than normal existence would have allowed. It would be the old frozen caveman scenario the likes of Encino Man, or the technological experiment of Idiocracy, where one is able to travel far past their lifespan by ducking out of a few centuries of aging in order to see the distant future. However, in this time-travel story line, there is no going back. This type of time travel I believe in. The future is out there. The past is not. 

I can't go into all the minute details of the flaws I see in time-travel theory without being in the moment of watching a story involving it, but I can generally say that I don't see any way that going back in time to have any actual effect on the happenings of the past can be possible. We can simulate or recreate aspects or instances of the past for an immersive experience that can feel very real, but nothing we do can have any effect on what already happened.